Certain mobile devices may be able to playback video from various sources. A typical mobile device video playback solution may involve the use of motion compensation techniques to decode video data prior to storing the data to a DRAM (dynamic random access memory) frame buffer, wherein a display controller might process the frame buffer data for output to a display device. Conventional attempts to reducing the memory footprint of data used for motion compensation operations may have a negative impact on display memory power efficiency. Conventional display memory power reduction techniques, on the other hand, may present challenges from a video decoding perspective.